9 markers Flashcards
(3 cards)
Gregory
Gregory’s theory proposes that we use past experience to make sense of the world around us.
The brain uses incoming sensory information plus information that we already know about the world.
Perception is therefore a construction.
The brain uses sensory information that is available and then fills in the gaps.
Past experience means we infer what should be there and draw a conclusion.
When making inferences, features of the environment (visual cues) give the brain information about depth, distance, etc.
Visual illusions occur because the brain has drawn the wrong conclusion from these cues.
Gregory proposes that perception depends on experience, i.e. learning.
For example, learning to see a chair as a chair.
The more we interact with the world, the more sophisticated our perception becomes.
gilchriuwst and nesberg
Gilchrist and Nesberg aimed to find out if food deprivation affects the perception of food pictures.
Two groups of students: one group deprived of food for 20 hours and a control group (not hungry).
Students were shown four slides of meals.
The slide was displayed for 15 seconds.
The picture was shown again, but dimmer, and participants had to adjust the lighting to make it look the same as it did before.
Participants perceived the food as brighter if they were deprived of food.
The control group (who were not deprived of food) didn’t perceive the food as brighter.
Being deprived of food increased perceptual sensitivity.
This shows that hunger is a motivating factor affecting the way food is perceived.
bruner and minturn
Bruner and Minturn aimed to find out whether an ambiguous figure was seen differently if the context of the figure was changed.
An independent groups design was used where participants were either presented with a sequence of letters or a sequence of numbers with the same ambiguous figure in the middle.
The ambiguous figure could be seen as either the letter B or as the number 13.
Those who saw a sequence of letters were more likely to report the figure as being the letter B.
If shown numbers they were more likely to say it was the number 13.
This shows that expectation of what the figure represented was affected by the context that the figure was presented in.
